Octogenarian who refuses to wear mask in virus-wracked Italy condemns those who protest virus restrictions.

No, it's true: the pontiff is effectively anti-mask.

But if others protest the infallible judgment of Caesar, they are privileged selfish types--possibly even merciless profiteers--but in all events incapable of imagining the suffering of others.

Meanwhile, he receives throngs of people without a mask because reasons.

The notion that people are terrified for their livelihoods or are exhausted by failed governmental policies cannot enter his closed Manichean mind. 

No, not for a moment. The sprawling factory complex where strawmen are assembled and burned by the thousand and labels substitute for engagement with those who think differently runs 24/7/365. Sadly, it is capable of producing only tiny amounts of actual empathy for those not with the program.

And the lockdown restrictions are returning.

I get it--record case count in Michigan yesterday.

What I would like to see is where the cases are coming from, and where the hospitalization rates are. Our dear friend Shelly is finally out of the hospital, and I know this is no joke. Especially for one of my demographic and health status.

What I have heard is that the colleges are swarming with new infections. My alma mater has a dorm where the sick are quarantined, per a friend who works there. They are near capacity and will have to start sending quarantined students home when they go over. While this is not a great development, it also seems to be the case that otherwise-healthy college age people shrug this off reasonably well.

I also have a good friend who is a small business owner. His business was one of the last permitted to reopen under the Governor's labyrinthine classification system. He can handle lowering capacity restrictions--to a point. But he won't survive another shutdown--certainly not without another stimulus to get him by. He already had to let go his No. 2 because he couldn't afford to keep him on the reduced payroll, and hasn't been able to bring him back.

We need to find the balance. 

 

The unseen depression.

One morning earlier this week I went back to my office in Motown this week to grab a few things. 

I discovered I had a nearly-full container of cleaning wipes that I had forgotten all about--snagged that little cylinder of figurative gold.

What was worrying was the lack of parking. But not in the sense I normally use.

In this case, parking lots were almost empty. 

One of the ones I used is up for sale, and I hope and pray the attendant, who has a wife and five children, has some kind of work right now.

The other one has a kiosk that is manned by an attendant.

Not this time. There were maybe fifteen cars in a lot that usually has 200 by mid-morning. No attendant.

And mass transit has become so bad that the Detroit drivers walked off the job today, protesting the conditions under which they have to work. Which include violence, threats, abuse and, yes, coronavirus. DDOT usually runs a decent-enough ship, but I have watched a driver being verbally-berated by a bus full of passengers before. And that was before the world went mad.

Long story short: I worry about Detroit's revival prospects, even if we get a good-enough vaccine.

Sufficient unto the day.

Thanks to Binks for the find. 

One of the finest souls I have met via the internet, not so by the way.

Posting it here again because Blogger has picture format issues...frequently.

Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,  but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

One of the great features of living in the Information Age is that what have so much at our fingertips. 

One of the great features of being an American is the belief that you can strive to meaningfully improve your lot and that of your family.

These threads merge in the notion that information--be it a job opening, a sale, education or news of some opportunity or right-able injustice--is a tool to fix things.

While these things are all true to some extent or another--varying by time, place, and clashing or incompatible forces--each can also lead to the loss of a sense of proportion.

The reality is, we have far too much information. Our human minds aren't built to process all of that data flowing into it--much less to act upon it. 

One of the many things the pandemic has shown us is how little control we actually have. But that loss of control has not dampened our demand for information. To the contrary, it has intensified it, even as our ability to do anything with the reams of data has shrunk by the same margin.

So we have overflowing heads and locked-down--to one degree or another--bodies. There's so much we want to do something about, yet our ability to act is corralled.

If that isn't a toxic cocktail, I don't know what is. To be honest, I think most of us are a bit out of sorts, and depression/anxiety are soaring. And despite (more likely because of) the endless roar of online voices, we feel alone. 

No wonder we see rents in the social fabric. 

And that's before you throw in the deliberate trolling and disinformation efforts. 

The answer is Tolkien's. 

We can't right every outrage, seize every opportunity, work up every solution or run every evil to ground. And that's without being plugged into a global network of truth and falsity which churns out new data of indeterminate quality by the gigabyte.

But we can till our own patch. We can shore up the shelters we have built for ourselves and others. We can look out for each other without being busybodies and scolds. We can keep an eye on the horizon without trying to puzzle out by-the-minute forecasts. And if--when--trouble comes looking for us, we can deal with it when it comes. And we'll probably have a clearer head when it does.

Or you can let your emotional buttons be endlessly mashed by things you cannot do a thing about, distracting you from those you can.

And yes, "Physician, heal thyself!" is definitely in play here.

The Economic Tsunami is Still Far Out to Sea.

The effects of shutting down the American economic machine are going to be felt for a long time to come.

"There’s a lot of denial here, as there was in the 1930s,” said Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California, Davis, who has written extensively about the Great Depression. “At the beginning of the Depression, nobody wanted to admit that it was a crisis. The actions the government took were not adequate to the scope of the problem, yet they were very quick to say there had been a turnaround.”

Though it may not attract the attention that reopening beaches and a soaring stock market might, the evidence is everywhere if you look closely.

Consider those seemingly great new employment numbers. It is clear that many workers who were temporarily laid off in March and April returned to work in May, such as employees at once-closed restaurants that opened up, or construction workers who returned to job sites.

Continue reading the main story

But it still left the economy with 19.55 million fewer jobs than existed in February. And the rebound came in part thanks to more than $500 billion in federal aid to small businesses offered on the condition that workers be retained, under the Paycheck Protection Program.

Other data points to a severe but slower-moving crisis of collapsing demand that will affect many more corners of the economy than those that were forced to close because of the pandemic.

New orders for manufactured goods, for example, remained in starkly negative territory in May, according to the Institute for Supply Management; its index came in at 31.8, far below the level of 50 that is the line between expansion and contraction.

* * *

“Hotels are locked down, so people buy fewer cars because they don’t need to travel as much,” said Veronica Guerrieri, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Restaurants are locked down, so people don’t need fancy clothes because they don’t want to go out as much.”

The result is that what started as a disruption to the supply side of the economy has metastasized into a collapse of the demand side, she and co-authors say in a recent working paper. They call it a Keynesian supply shock: an inversion of the demand-driven crisis of the Great Depression described by the great economist of that era, John Maynard Keynes.

Continue reading the main story

“Demand is interrelated with supply,” said Iván Werning, an M.I.T. economist and a co-author of the paper. “It’s not a separate concept.”

The demand shock, with lagged effects, is only beginning to hurt major segments of the economy, like sellers of capital goods that are experiencing plunging sales; state and local governments that are seeing tax revenues crater; and landlords who are seeing rent payments dry up.

The deflationary crunch has yet to squeeze with full force, rises in food and gas prices over the last few weeks notwithstanding.

When it does, it is going to be grim. And a depression will take lots of lives, too.

What. A. Shock.

Quantitative easing--the process by which the Fed has attempted to boost the economy by printing money to buy securities, and such--is a regressive tax on those with lower incomes.

But it's a boost for the rich, so Ben's got that going for him, which is nice.

Last month, the Bank of England issued a report that must have made Fed chairman Ben Bernanke squirm.

It said that the Bank of England’s policies of quantitative easing – similar to the Fed’s – had benefited mainly the wealthy.

Specifically, it said that its QE program had boosted the value of stocks and bonds by 26 percent, or about $970 billion. It said that about 40 percent of those gains went to the richest 5 percent of British households.

Many said the BOE's easing added to social anger and unrest. Dhaval Joshi, of BCA Research wrote that  “QE cash ends up overwhelmingly in profits, thereby exacerbating already extreme income inequality and the consequent social tensions that arise from it."

Here's a link to the Reason piece referenced in the article. Not a big fan of Reason as a whole, but the analysis here is sound.

It won’t be a surprise to read conservatives lambasting this as unconventional monetary policy meant to help re-elect President Obama. And inflation hawks have already started screeching. But the loudest cry of “for shame” should be coming from the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Quantitative easing—a fancy term for the Federal Reserve buying securities from predefined financial institutions, such as their investments in federal debt or mortgages—is fundamentally a regressive redistribution program that has been boosting wealth for those already engaged in the financial sector or those who already own homes, but passing little along to the rest of the economy. It is a primary driver of income inequality formed by crony capitalism. And it is hurting prospects for economic growth down the road by promoting malinvestments in the economy.

How is the Federal Reserve contributing to regressive redistribution, income inequality, and manipulated markets? Let’s flesh this out a bit.

Last month, Bernanke said that quantitative easing had contributed to the rebound in stock prices over the past few years, and suggested this was a positive outcome. “This effect is potentially important, because stock values affect both consumption and investment decisions,” he argued, apparently under the belief that the Fed has a third mandate to support rising stock prices.

This is ironically a trickle down monetary policy theory, where rising stock prices mean more wealth and more consumption that trickles down the economic ladder. One problem with this idea is that there is a gigantic mountain of household debt—about $12 trillion worth—that is diverting away any trickle down. An even worse assumption is that the stock market really reflects what is going on in the real economy.

If we had a news media (as opposed to high-production value fanzines) interested in fulfilling their functions as the only private businesses protected by the Constitution, they might ask the President--allegedly the tribune of the little guy--about the hammering effect of such a policy.

 But we don't.

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

This is known as "Stein's Law."

Just something to ponder, as we consider the Fed's enabling of fiscal irresponsibility:

The central bank's recently announced bid to stimulate the economy has also taken the pressure off politicians to deal with the U.S. fiscal cliff, Lindsay argued, which could result in destabilizing tax hikes and spending cuts automatically taking effect early next year.

"The Fed, maybe because it can't do otherwise, has told the Congress: 'We're going to buy your bonds no matter what,'" Lindsey said. "I think that's keeping the pressure off the president, off the Congress."


The effective of QE3 on interest rates may also keep Congress from reining in borrowing.

"If the (Fed) chairman's estimates of the effectiveness of QE3 on interest rates come true, we're going to be down to an average cost of borrowing for the government of 0.6 of a percentage point," Lindsey said. "Why would any Congress not borrow and spend if they could borrow at 60 basis points?"

Buckle up. I'm not sure where this ride ends, but the destination is almost certainly going to be some place we never wanted to go, nor ever imagined we would be.